Patricia Beard lived at a home that took care of mentally ill or disabled people.

The 32-year-old woman lived in a one bedroom apartment, number 109, at 555 East 11th Ave.

At 2:50 p.m. on March 27, 1981 someone unlocked her front door to see why she hadn’t left her room. A small portable TV, which was on a stand, was still on at low volume.

Beard was found on her bed. She was lying on her back with her face up. Her right leg was hanging over the side of the bed. Her blue panties and black pants were around her ankle. She was wearing a brown shoe on her right foot.

Her left leg was fully extended on the bed. Her left foot still had a sock on it.

Her pink robe was opened, spread apart. Her slip was pushed up above her genital area.

A large red cut was on the victim’s right jaw near her chin.

Denver’s homicide unit supervisor assigned Pete Diaz to the case the same day as her body was found. He wrote detailed notes about the scene.

Diaz entered the small apartment through a wooden door. The lock on the door was a knob, push-lock device. It was in good working order.

Jimma Reat, far right, with family members, photo taken from U.S. District Court record

Juan Rodriguez took the emergency call in downtown Denver early on the morning of April 1, 2012.

Four men had just had their lives threatened by a large group of Hispanic men in Southwest Denver.

The attackers assaulted Jimma Reat, his two brothers, Ran Pal and Chankuoth Pal, and a close friend, Joseph Kolong, with large beer bottles and “bottle rockets.”

The men had cursed the Sudanese refugees and called the victims the N-word and other ugly racial names.

They managed to elude their attackers and flee to the safety of their apartment complex in Wheat Ridge.

Rodriguez told the men they would get emergency help only if they returned to Denver, turned on the cars’ flashing emergency hazard lights to meet police.

The men obediently drove back to the neighborhood where they had just barely escaped with their lives, but Rodriguez did not send police to meet them.

When the four arrived at the location, the same men who had previously taunted them minutes earlier, opened fire, killing Reat.

“Jimma Reat was gunned down and died in his brother’s arms before the police were even dispatched,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Reat’s family against Rodriguez and Denver police by John Holland, Erica Grossman and
Anna Holland Edwards of the Denver law firm of Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman in September 2012.

Although Rodriguez has been fired, the men who killed Reat have not been arrested for the crime to this day.

“I walked up, rang the doorbell and was greeted by a tattooed woman with a young Rottweiler. She told me to have a seat…

“Sadly, everything I had imagined about a place that brags about selling brick weed was coming true. The tiny, cramped living room was trashed and the bud bar was actually just the pantry of the tiny galley kitchen…”

“Special Kinds had stashed a lot of tinctures and edibles, as well as pot-infused candies, in a cabinet by the refrigerator; the ganja was stored in opaque, plastic cereal containers on a low shelf, with the menu scribbled out on a white board above the shelf. It listed several different kinds of “highs,” including some supposed Skunk 1 and Afghani Kush; two “mids,” which were actually two kinds of seeded brick weed, and one huge brick of dirt-brown shit weed — the “low…”

Walker, who had a criminal record for illegally selling marijuana, had skipped a few steps required to meet state and local requirements for a legal dispensary.

The day Denver police found Jodi Lynn Carrigg’s remains, Colorado’s news media was focused on the Colorado Avalanche hockey team, which was making a run in the Stanley Cup, taking on the Florida Panthers.

The receiver was dangling from a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven store at 1490 Perry St. in West Denver.

Michael Avila, photo courtesy Colorado Bureau of Investigation

Tia Jacobson could still hear the sounds of taunting, punching and kicking.

Jacobson had been speaking to her fiance, Michael Avila, when she heard the angry voices.

The 2:30 a.m. confrontation on Saturday, Dec. 23, 1997, was sparked by a frivolous incident among strangers.

Michael Avila, a 19-year-old former kick boxer and karate tournament competitor, was caught at a vulnerable time in his life, according to a Rocky Mountain News article written by Michael O’Keeffe a few days after Avila was beaten to death.

He had been weakened by testicular cancer and one of his eyes was red after something had been caught behind his contact lens as he worked at a body shop with his dad.

Earlier in the evening, Avila and his brother, Mark Avila, had watched videos with friends. Avila asked his brother to drive him to a nearby 7-Eleven so he could call Jacobson.

Mark Avila saw a girl at a nearby house talk to Michael. She may have flirted with him. But Mark wasn’t interested and ignored the girl.

He put coins in the machine and began speaking with his fiancee.

Minutes later, two men jumped a fence between the store parking lot and a neighboring home and confronted Avila just as a 20-year-old witness pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot.

Another man, who was sitting in a 1987 Buick Riviera, jumped out of the car and joined in the fight.

The three knocked Avila to the ground and kicked him, a witness was quoted as saying.

John Patterson, 20, photo courtesy of Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons

Louis Locicero called out from inside a locked closet, where he had been placed hours earlier. Boulder county sheriff’s deputies had arrested him earlier that morning but they hadn’t told him why.

His placement in a dark closet seemed peculiar, but hours later he had a more practical matter to think about. He needed to pee – badly.

He heard footsteps.

Locicero was kneeling down with his face pressed against the linoleum floor, peering through the crack under the door. He could see boots as a person approached the closet he estimated was about 18 square feet in size.

Then Lucicero heard a voice, he said in a phone interview Saturday, 40 years later.

That’s what the hole in the floor is for, a deputy of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office told the Army war veteran through the door.

He wasn’t sure if he heard right. Pee into what hole? It was difficult to see because there was no light bulb in the closet. The only light that came into the closet was through the cracks around the door.

There was no toilet in the dark closet. He looked around, scanning the floor until he saw the hole the deputy was referring to.

Just pee into that hole, he asked again.

Yes, the answer came back: “Pee in the hole.”

A chorus of laughter followed. So he peed in the hole in the floor.

Locicero, then 32, was in the beginning stages of a nightmare that has followed him for 40 years, he said.

In the fall of 1975, he had driven his pickup truck from California to Colorado. He arrived on a Saturday, bought a newspaper on Sunday, and began working for a construction company by Monday.

He had been working since he was 7, when he cleaned enormous pots in his father’s bakery and was proud of his work ethic. His Boulder construction boss soon made him a foreman of a work crew.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.